GOOD MORNING LOWCOUNTRY

The World Question Center at www.edge.org every year asks scientists, doctors, philosophers and educators a question.

The question for 2006 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

Princeton University professor of astrophysics Piet Hut posted this idea:

"In everyday experience, time flows, and we flow with it. In classical physics, time is frozen as part of a frozen spacetime picture. And there is, as yet, no agreed-upon interpretation of time in quantum mechanics.

"What if a future scientific understanding of time would show all previous pictures to be wrong, and demonstrate that past and future and even the present do not exist? That stories woven around our individual personal history and future are all just wrong? Now that would be a dangerous idea."

We hope we've reassured you, dear reader, that those crow's feet do not really exist. They are just an illusion.

Still, here on Earth, we like to celebrate the passage of time. Like we did last night. That's why our head hurts this morning and we don't have much of an appetite.

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The World Question Center at www.edge.org[6] every year asks scientists, doctors, philosophers and educators a question.

The question for 2006 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

Princeton University professor of astrophysics Piet Hut[7] posted this idea:

"In everyday experience, time flows, and we flow with it. In classical physics, time is frozen as part of a frozen spacetime picture. And there is, as yet, no agreed-upon interpretation of time in quantum mechanics.

"What if a future scientific understanding of time would show all previous pictures to be wrong, and demonstrate that past and future and even the present do not exist? That stories woven around our individual personal history and future are all just wrong? Now that would be a dangerous idea."

We hope we've reassured you, dear reader, that those crow's feet do not really exist. They are just an illusion.

Still, here on Earth, we like to celebrate the passage of time. Like we did last night. That's why our head hurts this morning and we don't have much of an appetite.